Hide and go seek

Councilmember Scott Sherman seethed this week over city Real Estate Assets honcho Cybele Thompson’s inability to differentiate between a park and a patch of dirt, as discovered by City Auditor Eduardo Luna.

Don’t rely too much on labels, for too often they are fables.

—Charles H. Spurgeon

When Mayor Kevin Faulconer stepped before reporters last week to spank the city’s Public Utilities Department for a rash of water bill complaints, he had City Auditor Eduardo Luna by his side.

Faulconer even included a quote from Luna in his July 26 press release on the controversy. The release included the observation that “the audit staff did an outstanding effort in determining the extent and causes of the reported high water bills.”

There was something, however, that the mayor didn’t mention. On the very same day of the press release, the city quietly issued a request for a proposal to seek a replacement for Luna, whose 10-year term is set to expire next April unless he’s reappointed. (Under city rules, the mayor nominates someone to the position, but the San Diego City Council must approve the pick.)

Faulconer also didn’t offer any words of praise or otherwise on the scathing performance audit that Luna had released three days prior. An audit that, once again, put the city’s Real Estate Assets Department (READ) in a harsh spotlight.

Both reports were on the agenda for Monday’s meeting of the city council’s Audit Committee. But in an interesting twist, committee members—including two Republican councilmembers whose votes Faulconer would need to oust Luna—not only gushed about Luna’s recent work and saved their sharpest knives for the revelation that, despite warnings to shape up dating back to 2005, the leadership of READ still seems to be unable to walk and chew gum simultaneously.

The READ performance audit discovered much about the department. It showed that there was some improvement in such no-brainer duties as knowing exactly how much land the city owns (the portfolio boasts a whopping 1,600 sites totaling 123,000 acres), as well as updating the department’s antiquated computer system. Still, READ still seems to have a problem telling the difference between an undeveloped plot of dirt or a vacant building and a sparkling new neighborhood park.

The auditor’s office reviewed the “current use” classifications for city-owned properties, which is managed by the departments of Parks and Recreation and Public Utilities, and unearthed some troubling errors. For Parks and Rec, auditors found that in a sampling of 126 sites larger than a quarter acre, 20 parcels of the 126 “did not reflect the current status of the property,” senior performance auditor Kevin Christensen told the Audit Committee Monday.

In the case of the Public Utilities Department, 29 of 111 properties sampled were similarly misclassified, a 26 percent error rate.

The auditor’s office determined that the problems existed due to poor communications between READ and other property-managing departments and that there was a failure to “align with industry best practices,” Christensen noted. (It should also be noted that at least Parks and Recreation and Public Utilities had information to analyze. Conversely, the city’s Transportation and Storm Water Department—which manages more than 300 acres of city property—said it had no information to offer.)

Cybele Thompson, READ’s director—who was already feeling heat for the handling of the city’s purchase of the old Sempra headquarters building just north of City Hall that remains vacant—seemed almost nonchalant Monday about the seriousness of the high rate of classification fuckups.

As Audit Committee member Thomas Hebrank put it, “In going through this audit, we seem to have something of a long history of some shortcomings and deficiencies here.” He was noting that problems have been highlighted as far back as a 2005 San Diego Union-Tribune exposé, as well as a 2007 grand jury report and a Grubb & Ellis analysis that same year.

“The major issue has been what the current use is,” Thompson told the Audit Committee. “So for other land-managing departments… a lot of times they’ll change what a use is, and we may not know until we go do something with the property or sell it or lease it. So that’s one of the recommendations that we’ll be working on for this year.”

She also boasted about her department’s annually required Portfolio Management Plan [PMP], which she described as “very thorough,” but within that same breath she also admitted that the plan “doesn’t include a list of every single property in its current use because that would be quite a lengthy list and not really useful to [city] council.”

She was then slammed for not presenting the PMP report to the full City Council, as required by Council Policy 700-10. Instead, she provided the annual report by email to city executives and council offices, while also posting it on READ’s website. Thompson said the council hasn’t docketed such a presentation.

“We offer briefings and presentations if anyone would like them,” she added.

The steam was almost visible from the ears of Councilmember Scott Sherman, who sits on the Audit Committee chaired by Republican colleague Lorie Zapf. “I think the thing that concerns me the most is the lack of accountability from [READ],” he fumed, “especially the lack of desire for a standardized form or a truing up of the current use versus the designated use.”

Always one with a personal story, Sherman railed about a 10-acre parcel of land north of Rancho Park Drive in Del Cerro that’s listed as parkland.

“That land’s been sitting there vacant since I was in high school, which is quite a while ago,” he said. “A park was built a couple blocks away just a year or two ago, so I mean I don’t think it’s ever going to be parkland.”

Dirt plots and some vacant buildings across San Diego are listed similarly as neighborhood parks, even though those dreams may be years away if not altogether unreachable. Zapf added, “it’s a little insulting” to community members to list land as a park “when it’s just dirt.”

Luna told Spin he’d like to continue on as city auditor, but preferred for now to stay above the politics.

“I think the work speaks for itself,” he said. Asked for comment, mayoral spokesperson Greg Block noted that READ has agreed to all recommendations in the audit, which he called “critical to good government.” As to a search for Luna’s replacement, Block added, “This process is healthy for the city to go through and is standard procedure.”